


Undyne gets fired

by morefishplease



Series: Comfy Fish Stories [52]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Fat People, Getting Fired, Waiters & Waitresses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-11-04 07:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10986258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morefishplease/pseuds/morefishplease
Summary: Undyne loses her temper and her job in that order.





	Undyne gets fired

“UNDYYYNE!”

“WHAAAT?”

“Table four needs more nachos,” Maurice says, sashaying past Undyne. Undyne rolls her eyes, jabs a quick elbow. Maurice struts off holding a sore rib, wags a finger. “Do that too many more times and I’ll cut you, bitch,” he teases.

“Like to see you try,” Undyne growls, cocks her arm back. Maurice scurries away out of range, leans up against the wall. He’s humming old show tunes again, reading over a script. “Another audition?” Undyne asks, and he nods, still engrossed. “When are you going to actually get a part?” Ah, there she’s struck a nerve. His eyes flick up, narrow on hers.

“Rude,” he says, returning to the script. Undyne takes a long swig from her water bottle, presses it against her gills. The condensation feels like heaven, she always gets so parched that her poor gills crinkle like tissue paper when she gets off work. You run a light finger over them, coo and fuss. She loves the attention even though she bats you away with a purr like sandpaper.

“Why aren’t you handling table four?” Undyne asks. Maurice shrugs.

“I’m on break,” he explains. He frowns, reads aloud in an exaggerated accent: “I know, father, but honestly it isn’t – no, that sounds too forced,” he breaks. “Maybe more concern," he muses. Undyne leans over, tries to peer at the cover on the binder.

“What show is it?” she asks. Maurice covers the binder with his arms, hugging it to his chest.

“Not telling,” he says, eyeing her distrustfully. Undyne rolls her eyes, blows out a big exasperated sigh.

“You think I want to steal your role?” she asks.

“Maybe,” he grumbles. “I know father but honestly it isn’t – no, that’s too fast.”

Undyne sidles next to him, smacks him with her hip. Maurice stumbles, smacks her back. Undyne barely budges, solid as a rock. “Have you ever thought about, I don’t know, not acting? For the line, I mean.”

“What?”

“Just like, read the line how you talk. You have an acting voice,” she points out, and Maurice recoils.

“I do not.”

“Do too. Record yourself.”

“I don’t believe you,” he sneers, crosses his arm. “You do want my role, don’t you?”

Undyne rolls her eyes. “’Your’ role. Sure thing, nerd.”

Maurice grits his teeth, watches her go. His eyes flick over the fish-girls long stockinged legs and athletic behind, and he sighs, lets the momentary anger go. “If only she were a man,” he breathes dreamily. “I know, father, but –“

 

▪ ▪ ▪

 

“Where were you?” the woman belts out as soon as Undyne rounds the corner with the nachos. “We’ve been waiting on these nachos for ages.” Undyne glares, bites back a remark.

“I’m sorry for any delay,” she says primly, setting the nachos down, trying to keep her eye from straying onto the bulging guts of the woman and what is presumably her husband. Their child, a bubbly three-year-old, tugs at Undyne’s sleeve, and Undyne looks down into a pair of big woodbrown eyes and feels her heart melt into a sloppy mess. She grins wide and sharp and burbles out a breathy “hey little guy!” before the woman smacks the child’s hand, pulls it roughly from Undyne’s shirt.

“Don’t grab her clothes,” she says, waving a chubby finger in the tyke’s face. Undyne is biting her lip hard enough to draw blood and she can feel a hot fury like Greek fire coursing whitehot stallionlike through her veins.

“Maybe –“ Undyne begins, and then she stops herself. The woman looks up, a curiously triumphant expression on her piggy face. ‘I’m going to lose my job,’ Undyne realizes in a thin, flashing moment of clarity, when she sees the delight shining in the woman’s eyes. ‘This is it,’ she thinks.

“What did you say?” the woman asks.

Undyne narrows her eyes, tries to will herself into keeping her cool. “Maybe you shouldn’t treat your kid that way,” Undyne says, and the woman pales with anger. She hauls herself ungainly to her feet and in a surprisingly fluid motion flings the contents of her glass at Undyne. Undyne takes a step back, wipes the soda from her eyes. The woman is lecturing her, wagging her finger in Undyne’s face, and it is making her just – angry – enough – to –

THERE

and like in slow motion a halo of black fire blooms in Undyne’s ruined eye as Undyne cocks her arm back, weaves a scintillating spear out of nothing, wills it into her hand, humming with blinding potential. She blinks, the dull pinprick of light in the middle of her socket winking in and out again as she adjusts back to binocular vision, and then she focuses on the woman cowering away in front of her. Imagine it in freeze-frame, imagine the fat rolls wobbling in panic, the dumb look in her foolish cow eyes, the way Undyne flexes and bursts the sleeves of her shirt and legs of her pants through force of will alone, the way her arm lunges forward, ready to throw –

 

▪ ▪ ▪

 

An hour later Undyne walks home in the rain, clutching a sodden paycheck and a pink slip. She hadn’t looked at the forecast that day and, as her hair hangs lank around her face and her gills soak luxuriantly in the sudden moisture, she’s glad she hadn’t. She replays the look on the woman’s face as she threw the spear again and again, but if only she had seen the unabashed awe on the kid’s face, or the slowly dawning smile on Maurice’s. She looks up, feels the rain patter down on her face, and her frown slowly evaporates. Her mouth curls up into a gawking grin and she spins, sending up a razor splash of water. She pats on her gills, feels the way they suck gently and gratefully against her fingers, and then takes off her shoes frees her aching feet. She runs home with your name on her lips, already recounting to herself the story she’ll tell you.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm of two minds on this one, I like the first half, it's a nice little interaction between two very different characters. All that stuff about an acting voice is totally accurate, by the way; I used to be very into theatre and a lot of people think that the key to acting is, well, acting, as opposed to being. If you act it'll always feel like you're acting. Being a good actor is very, very difficult. The second half, on the other hand, is too stereotypical and obvious. It is nice to get another opportunity for Undyne to go super saiyan on somebody, I wish I'd been subtler about it. Plots generally aren't my strong suit; I'm much more of an episodic kind of girl, and it really shows in stories like this one.
> 
> You can look at this as a case study on stereotypes, how to use them well and poorly. Maurice is a total stereotype, but he's still a person - the fat bitch, on the other hand, is just a fat bitch. She's dehumanized, and while perhaps she needs to be, it's still too simple for it to be good writing. But there's only so much you can fit in to a page and a half or so, and I only have so much time I can devote to these stories, so sometimes there are stinkers like this one. Oh, and the end could use a little clarification too, because I know I intended that Undyne intentionally misses the spear throw but the way it's written it looks like she kills the slob lmao


End file.
